Any hollow handled knife (other than one of Chris Reeves' one piece masterpieces) will have a joint between the blade and the handle. This will make it fragile. If you absolutely, positively must carry a bunch of crap with your knife, my recommendation would be to attach a small nylon pouch to the sheath instead of going the hollow handle route.
After testing many, many general purpose bushcraft/"survival" type knives, I've decided upon the Fallkniven F1 as my # 1 choice. It is more than adequate if you develop the necessary skills, and small/light enough to have with me most all of the time.
I hope that this helps.
I've used my Chris Reeve Jereboam Mk II (8.75" blade) over five years (2004 birth card and a 2009 purchase) and so much I think I probably used mine more than anyone else who owns them...: I had to re-finish it
twice, in two different colors, after the finish wore off... At the third re-finishing I sold it, because by then I understood it was a compromised design for various reasons.
Despite being well made, and at first glance a quite rational design, it pretty much taught me everything that I want to avoid in a survival knife, and this influences every feature I look for in a "Survival Knife" to this day (My ideal now being something quite close to a Lile "Mission"...).
1-Edge thickness: 0.040" is close to acceptable, but not close enough: 0.020 to 0.030" is far, far better at nearly no loss in edge strength for chopping, although under 0.030" you have to be careful to not twist the blade when "unsticking" a Full Flat Grind design (hollow grinds with a low sabre grind appear less vulnerable to chipping doing this).
2-Edge thickness increases considerably towards the tip: 0.050" or more at least. A very bad feature to be absolutely avoided: The geometry of the Jereboam's tip prevents any simple fix...
3-Handle is relieved to a narrower radius near the "guard": This makes it
seem more comfortable, but in fact it greatly increases the amount of "rearing up" within the hand when chopping.
4-Small guard: I am believer in fairly big guards when chopping close to the hand. I've had the Lile Sly II guard more than once saving impacts on my fingers, once hard enough to bend it...
5-Blade length/balance: 8.75" is too short for serious chopping with a knife, and is close to the point at which the center of balance goes close to or into the hand, changing the knife's reaction to chopping impact tremendously: It drastically increases the impact to the hand to have the knife "rear up" more easily as the balance point nears the guard... In my experience there is no reason for a "Survival Knife" to have a blade under ten inches, and many reasons
not to go under ten inches...
6-Overall balance: The Jereboam's thick handle walls are unnecessary and worsen point #9, as well as making the knife feel much heavier when carrying than the raw figures suggest...
7-Handle capacity: The thick walls result in a cavity that is much too narrow, negating a huge amount of interior space, despite being very deep, and on the Reeve this is worsened by the thick protruding buttcap threading design that pushes the content deeper, and wastes a large amount of space both in width and in length... The Reeve's handle can barely hold 15 or 20 matches before its entire cross-section is completely obstructed, and it probably has not much over half, maybe two-thirds at best, of the overall volume of useable space available inside the similar sized Lile handle, which can hold a 60 hour endurance Muyshondt Maus Mk 1 flashlight, 20 matches, fishing gear, 4 safety pins, 5 Advils, cord tinder and several other items...
8-The A-2 Carbon steel has adequate but unimpressive edge holding... In general any stainless is always to be preferred across the board, regardless of use...
9-Blade narrowness: This is probably the single worst feature of the Jereboam: The blade's narrowness, by bringing the edge up very close to the outer diameter of the handle, has the effect of removing directional stability while chopping: This makes the Jereboam the one round-handled knife that has the most vicious rolling tendency of any of the other hollow handles I have tried, and the nastiness of this is worsened by the absence of a real guard to either protect the hand or, more importantly, prevent rolling (a "stabilizing" role the guard can play in other knives)... This is the only knife that regularly injured my hand while chopping: It would routinely bounce on the bottom of the V cut, viciously change direction and swing dangerously to one side...
10-One piece durability: In my experience this advantage is illusory compared to a quality knife with a properly attached tube handle: The cost in weight, balance and in the absence of a real guard out-weight any advantage.
The Jereboam Mk II is the perfect example of a knife that looks extremely sound on paper, yet has numerous functional flaws in practice... Still not a terrible knife, no one would be embarrassed to have one, but a lot of more ungainly-looking designs actually perform much better at the same weight...
Gaston
